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You may think that Twitter is just good for following celebrities and swapping tweets with friends. But the social network is capable of a lot more. Specialized services have tweaked it to turn ordinary Twitter accounts into robots that can carry out helpful tasks.

Planning to shop for a game console this holiday season, and wondering which one will suit your clan? Here's a look at the three major consoles, as well as at the top five family-friendly titles for each one.

Oracle is buying RightNow Technologies for about US$1.5 billion in order to boost its recently announced Public Cloud with customer-service software, the companies announced Monday. The deal is expected to close late this year or in early 2012.

Cray was awarded a $97 million contract to build a supercomputer that could potentially deliver up to 20 petaflops of peak performance, or 20 quadrillion floating operations per second, to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have jointly launched a consortium to support and develop a new low-power memory called Hybrid Memory Cube, which could challenge DDR3 memory in high-performance computers in a few years.

Microsoft has signed a patent agreement with Taiwan's Compal Electronics that provides coverage under its patent portfolio for Compal's tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer devices running Android or the Chrome platform, the company said Sunday.

Heartland Payment Systems figured it was in pretty good shape when it took out a $30 million cyber insurance policy. Unfortunately, the credit card transaction processor was the victim of a massive data breach in early 2009 that resulted in losses estimated at $145 million. The insurance company did pay Heartland the $30 million, but the company was on the hook for the remaining $115 million.

Of the 470,000 Wi-Fi connections made on a recent day at Abilene Christian University, fully 94% used the 2.4GHz band, representing an extreme example of how today's surging number of Wi-Fi clients is crowding the band least able to accommodate them.